With the rapid growth of three-dimensional (3D) television, next generation broadcast systems aim to provide natural viewing experience in true three dimensions. A true multi-view consists of a collection of multiple video representations of 3D scene captured by different cameras. The system needs large cameras and complicated coding and transmission systems. The level of processing required raises the cost of the system.
Disparity estimation involves estimating the displacement between the left-eye and right-eye images. Disparity estimation generally requires a high level of processing. Many approaches perform pixel by pixel estimation between the two images. This requires a lot of processing power and raises both the costs and the amount of time required to perform the processing.
It is possible to use techniques and pre-existing processing logic used for two-dimensional processing of images to generate disparity estimations between the two views at the block level and process the block level disparities to upscale the disparities to the pixel level for use in generating new views for a multi-view system.